


I Think She Did It

by notalone91



Series: LoserFest 2021 [2]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Baking, Domestic Fluff, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, M/M, True Crime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-13 03:08:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29146446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalone91/pseuds/notalone91
Summary: A certain true crime case has stuck in Richie's mind since 1990.  Eddie will find out why.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Series: LoserFest 2021 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2138544
Comments: 2
Kudos: 27





	I Think She Did It

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt for LoserFest Day 2 - A Taylor Fave. I chose baking and true crime.

“Come on, Richie, you know that’s a bullshit reason!” Eddie says- no, screams into the kitchen. “If that were true, I would be doing 30 to life!”

There’s a clatter from the next room, followed by a hushed curse. “That’s different!” he says after a moment. “She specifically said that she was pushed to the edge after years of psychological and physical abuse. Do you mean to tell me that you never-”

Pulling his feet up onto their couch, Eddie bangs the remote against his knee. “No. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that I never, not once, wanted to kill my ex-wife.”

“But you took one look at me,” he calls, popping his head around the corner in just a tacky, bright yellow apron that reads ‘basically a detective’ in a dripping font above the outline of a dead body and his pajama pants, “after 27 years, and decided that you were suddenly mad enough to leave her?”

Eddie makes a strangled noise into a throw pillow before standing up to follow him. “No, I took one look at you and remembered that I’m a glutton for punishment-” he says with a laugh, wrapping his hands around his fiance’s shoulders to dramatically wring his neck. Richie throws his ass back into him and he moves away, laughing as he props himself up on one of the kitchen island stools. 

With A Woman Scorned paused at the halfway mark on their TV, Eddie’s attention had been drawn to more pressing matters- like Richie’s patented Slutty Brownies, so named because of the sounds Eddie made while eating them. “And a glutton for these. What’s taking so long?”

Richie snorts a laugh again. “They’re almost ready to go in the oven,” he says. Turning back to Eddie, he sticks out a bottle of salted caramel sauce in one hand, a handful of toothpicks in the other. “Squeeze or swirl?” 

Choosing the bottle, Eddie hops off the stool and crosses to where Richie had already prepared the pan. He dollops puddles of caramel all through the brownie batter that concealed the rest of the diabetic nightmare beneath. Richie drags the toothpick through each spot, trailing strands of sweetness all throughout the fudgy batter. He pops the tray into the oven with a clash and sets the timer, depositing the dirty dishes in the dishwasher and starting that, too. 

The real reason he picked the caramel, however, is still his little secret. 

He flicks the cap open silently and grabs Richie by the free hand not cleaning up the counter. He spins him back and squirts the sticky sauce onto Richie’s lip, then kisses it directly off of him. Richie can’t even complain that he didn’t get a taste of it because the taste is all over Eddie’s mouth which makes it a hundred times better anyway. 

“Come on,” he says, leading Richie back into the living room. “I can’t wait to see the look on your face when you realize how wrong you are. 

Richie rolls his eyes and follows. "You sure about that?" he asks.  He knows he’s right. 

"Yeah," Eddie answers. "Although, you know so much about this one, I'm beginning to wonder if you didn't have something to do with it." Richie snorts a laugh and lets himself get pushed into the corner of the couch and rearranged to be a human pillow, which he could never, ever mind.

Eddie is pouty when the decision scene rolls around. Even worse than he was when he realized that Richie was right about what she said. He even Googled it to make sure it wasn’t a fictionalized line. It was pulled directly from the trial transcript. When the timer beeps about midway through the credit crawl, Richie’s already been in the kitchen, making sure everything’s ready for the brownies to come out of the oven. He pads in after the movie and a few more necessary Google searches. He folds his arms and rests his head on them, then wrinkles his nose up at Richie. “How did you know all of that if you’d never seen this before?”

Over the clatter of the oven rack, Richie groans in a way that Eddie is sure means that he is mentally rolling his eyes and searching the sky for an answer. “The court cases were in October of 1990 and October 1991, babe. It was one of the biggest court cases of the year and, for the first time, there wasn’t much else to worry about?” He puts the brownies on the cooling rack and smiles at them proudly. They’re perfect. Even more than the batch of chocolate chip he’d made the day of the original trial. “You don’t know why I would remember things in that period of time clearly?” 

A strange sadness settles over Richie. Eddie’s gotten good at gauging the moments he should drop and the ones he should investigate. This one requires thought. 

"I don’t remember…" he muses, clipping his thought. 2 years after everything. "1991. Why would I remember 1991?" He kept digging into his memories. It frustrates him, sometimes, when he can't remember things he knows he should. It reminds him of everything he’d almost lost. That would have been the summer before 11th grade. 11th grade, he was in Augusta already. "Stan and I both left in the summer of 19-" He looks over at his fiance, who's subtly nodding as he cuts the last chocolate square. "Oh."

"Yeah," Richie agrees, taking the pan to the sink and licking a crumb from his finger. "Oh."

He crosses behind him and wraps his arms tightly around his middle, pressing his cheek to his back. "Oh. Honey, I’m so-"

Turning within his grasp, Richie rests against the edge of the sink. He wraps his own arms around Eddie and kisses his forehead. "Eds, it’s fine. I just had a lot of time on my hands." It was true, of course. Bill and Mike were their own thing and he would never have taken that away from them, so he just withdrew. In fact, he’s not even sure that they knew that he was leaving before he did. That was his bad, he supposed, but he didn’t know that early acceptance was a thing, so when UCLA offered to test him out so that he could start the following fall, he jumped at the chance, remembering his previous insistence that he would do anything to get out of Derry.

Eddie closes his eyes, resting comfortably against Richie’s chest. They stay like that for a while, who knows how long, lost in their own thoughts. Suddenly, Eddie jumps back as though burned. "Oh my God, our first date was-”

“October 22, 1990,” Richie laughs. “Yeah. Coincidentally. And you left summer of 1991 So, I, uh,” he looks down and rocks back against the counter a couple of times, “moped and watched Court TV for the entirety of the second trial.” He remembered the feeling well. Truthfully, he spent years trying to figure out what his true-crime obsession had stemmed from, and, yes, it’s a popular interest, but usually, people have a reason. “And, as one does when they’re going through it, I taught myself how to bake. So, I watched the events of the second half of the movie live with a tray of fresh brownies.”

It seems like an awful, sad cliche. Gay man gets heartbroken, learns to bake. Still, it’s the truth. And now, years and years down the line, he gets to sit on the couch with the man he loves, watching youtube videos about other true crimes that they can watch them on their next weekly date night in. 

Eddie reaches down to the coffee table and grabs his brownie to break off a bite. “Richie-” he says- No, moans. 

Richie feels some type of way about it, but is trying to conceal it. He leans in, pretending to clean the spot of peanut butter away with his thumb before kissing it off instead. “This is so much better than the original,” he says, voice low.

“Yeah,” Eddie agrees, pulling Richie down for another, deeper kiss.


End file.
